Sex Shop's first incarnation, in the south coast resort of Folkestone, played on ideas of the seaside town as a place of secret liaisons and dirty weekends, conducted against a scenic, yet simultaneously shabby and dilapidated backdrop. The ‘sex shop’ is of course a seaside staple, often selling genuine sex aids flanked by an assortment of humorous trinkets and throwaway paraphernalia. Sex Shop now tours to the very different surroundings of design conscious Hackney, a place where pleasure seeking is taken very seriously.

For Sex Shop, curators Sarah Gillham, Jack Stokoe and Darren Nairn invited 50 artists, designers and creative people to develop a prototype version of their own sex or fetish object. Playfully engaging with issues surrounding sex and desire the responses span a wide range of different media, from 3D maquettes, to 2D visualisation, time-based pieces, and references to panoply of sexual practices, fetishes and merchandise. They are by turns personal, provocative and usable.

The upcoming exhibition at Transition Gallery will take place in two parts and will coincide with a special sex themed edition of Garageland magazine.

Between the Manifest and the Hidden is Antoine Puisais’s first London solo show.

“I have only fractured and vague memories of my often dark and fraught childhood. It took till my early twenties for the realization to dawn that something inside me was deeply broken and that’s when I started painting… I found painting healing… it filled in the cracks… and it became a new world I could explore emotionally and intellectually... It became addictive, a fix in every sense... I didn’t ask myself if I was or wasn’t an artist. I just knew that I was.”

Antoine Puisais lasted half a day at art school. Maybe it was arrogance or immaturity, but for Puisais the act of painting was a primal urge, not a to be mediated and contained by classrooms and career plans. It was an itch that needed to be scratched. So he went D.I.Y. his path littered with many errors and fewer, hard-won victories. Somewhere along the way he discovered that what he loved, what he had a kind of fatalistic obsession with, was that moment that always comes in acts of the creations, the moment of finely poised balance between success and ruin, the precise point beyond which the wrong move, the misplaced gesture, would be irredeemable.

Accordingly Puisais is fascinated not only by the visible, by what can be seen on the work’s surface, but also by the invisible, marks and passages that have been removed or those that were imagined but never made. So the works are both full and broad, incorporating painting and printing, collages of found objects, areas of deliberate damage, wild and precise in varying measures. Each one is a contested zone, between what is and what might be, held in tension between the forces of creation and destruction.

“For me, creation is a binary act… I add and I remove and what interests me it is what remains, what survives this soft war between the manifest and the hidden.”

For Frieze New York in May Vigo will present a a selection of historical works from the artist’s private collection. Ibrahim El Salahi is considered the godfather of African and Arabic Modernism and by many in the museum world to the link with western modernism due to his cross cultural learning, exposure and experience over 60 years.

This will include rare 1960s paintings and drawings as well as monumental works from the 80s and 90s. The works on canvas will include three major works:

We will show Visual Diary of Time Waste Palace one of Ibrahim's most important works, created on blank square books found in the Emir’s Palace during his self imposed exile in Doha where he acted as advisor to the Qatari government and then as a translator at the Emir's palace where he documented the countries history. This series began on his 66th birthday, September 5th 1996 and continued until April 28th, 1997. On completion, El-Salahi decided to dedicate his life solely to his art. It is a pivotal Museum quality work.

In addition to this we propose showing Untitled 1984, which like the Time Waste Palace featured in his TATE show. This is considered by Salahi to be his masterpiece on paper comparable to the more famous The Inevitable, and is typical of his practice where he starts with one sheet of paper and the composition grows outwards organically.

Last year he was the first African artist to have a solo retrospective at TATE Modern. This year he had a very successful Gallery show at Vigo and next year participation at Frieze in NY would be a full circle for an 84 year old who first met and engaged with Alfred Bar in 1965 but subsequently returned to Sudan to recapture his African identity. These works are accessible now with the artist’s involvement. We have wonderful information at our disposal from the artist but also from the TATE and Museum of African Art publications. The MOAA closed due to funding problems after the catalogue was printed so curators, collectors and the public will not have seen works on this scale in New York.

MOMA, TATE, Guggenheim, British Museum, National Museum of African Art Washington, and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Newark Museum all hold El-Salahi’s work in their collections, he is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential figures in African and Arabic modernism.

Please click HERE to view information on his his ten room solo show at TATE Modern last summer (June to September 2013).

A solo exhibition of British artist and writer Tim Etchells, comprising a large series of new text drawings, a neon installation and performance across VITRINE’s two spaces (Bermondsey Street & Bermondsey Square). The exhibition will display the truly multifaceted nature of his practice and further expand Etchells’ explorations of the possibilities and limitations of language and the conditions of performativity and liveness.

At VITRINE Bermondsey Street, a new body of work named ‘Personal Statement’ creates a complex installation of acrylics and graphite drawings. Works of varied dimensions are hung in an unruly cluster creating an installation across the gallery.

Contrasting the singularity of Etchells’ single-phrase works in neon, LED and print media, ‘Personal Statement’ is as much about the dynamic relation between the materials used in different elements of the installation, as it is about the content of individual texts or phrases. The work creates a field or constellation of relation, in which the value and significance of statements is constantly modified and reinvented in dialogue with their context. Clearly unfinished and temporary in its manifestation as a dense cluster on a wall, ‘Personal Statement’ .

At the Private View, Etchells will present a short improvised performance under the title ‘Word File (VITRINE)’, drawing on and developing the strategies for text improvisation that he has pursued in recent years in the full length performance project ‘A Broadcast/Looping Pieces’ (2014), previously performed at David Roberts Foundation and Hayward Gallery, London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, KunstenFestivaldesArts, Brussels, Hebbel Theatre, Berlin amongst other places. Addressing the text materials of the installation ‘Personal Statement’, the mesmerising ‘Word File (VITRINE)’ is, at the same time, a playful live remixing of pages from Etchells’ notebook – a computer document in which he has gathered different kinds of texts over many years. Comical, virtuosic and provocative, ‘Word File (VITRINE)’ is concerned with both the semantic aspects of spoken language and the textural and musical qualities it acquires in live performance.

VITRINE Bermondsey Square will feature the neon installation ‘Who Knows’ (2014), in which Etchells combines and re-combines the simple-but-complicated phrases ‘I Know’, ‘You Know’, ‘They Know’ and ‘We Know’, giving hallucinatory space to the contradictions and connections of their semantic and visual content.

The first London solo exhibition of internationally esteemed artist Mx Justin Vivian Bond. The exhibition will draw on Mx Bond’s award-winning practise as writer, singer, painter and performance artist. Creating a performative exhibition space, the gallery will at once reflect the captivating and inspirational writings of this groundbreaking artist whilst containing a body of new and existing video, performance, text, print, sculptural and watercolour works in one installation.

At the heart of the exhibition is a collection of watercolour paintings: a series of Diptychs consisting of portraits of model Karen Graham and Mx Bond. Karen Graham was the face of Estée Lauder Cosmetics from 1970-1985. Juxtaposed with self-portraits of Mx Bond these watercolours reflect and enhance the obsessive nature of the relationship, which developed during v’s adolescence, with the model who v describes “as blank and perfect as the sphinx - only more modern and wearing LOTS of make-up”.

With these images of Karen Graham and throughout the exhibition Mx Bond explores the gateway to self- determination “presented by a subjective association with an external image which allowed me to aspire to internally create an image of myself and for myself where I was able to live in a private state of grace.”

The title of the show “My Model / My Self” references the pop-psychology book “My Mother My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity” which was originally published in 1977 by feminist author Nancy Friday. Drawing parallels between this book and the difficulties inherent in the search of the “transchild” to find suitable role models within a traditional familial structure “My Model /My Self” becomes about a journey to escape traditional gender roles through a capitalist phantasm of self-creation as a survival mechanism.

The signifiers of these phantasms are reflected throughout the exhibition by commercially produced, limited edition wallpapers (in collaboration with wallpaper designer George Venson of Voutsa), posters (which include re-contexutalized images of “tear-outs” of photographs of Karen Gramham taken by Viktor Skebneski for Estée Lauder ads) , and sculptural installations including a stack of self-published “My Model / My Self” paperback books formed into the shape of a wishing well. These posters, wallpapers and blank books create a space for contemplation, expectation, and a possibility for the public fulfillment of privately conceived potentialities.

Throughout the length of the exhibition Mx Bond will occasionally appear in performance as the gallery window is transformed into a public/private space with a “step and repeat” made of customised artist wallpaper and set with a red carpe and velvet rope. The artist instructs that this space is only to be occupied by Justin Vivian Bond or Karen Graham.

Potential Architecture fuses art and architecture in four site-specific commissions for Ambika P3 by international artists/architects Alexander Brodsky, Sean Griffiths, Joar Nango and Apolonija Šušterŝič. Utilising recycling, craft, and low-tech processes as well as performance, video, sculpture and installation, the works explore the social and material aspects of living environments during the unprecedented large-scale transformation of cities and towns globally.

Potential Architecture draws on the interconnected histories and cultures of renowned practitioners from Russia, Slovenia, Norway and the UK working at the increasingly diverging interface of art and architecture. Each has an interdisciplinary practice that enables heightened responses to ideas of how communities evolve, how social spaces are used and buildings made. Cultivating new ideas and alternative approaches around the built environment, their commissions for the exhibition indirectly respond to a growing critique on the negative effects of property speculation.

Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva present a magical, immersive film installation for their first major show in London. The kaleidoscopic world created by 27 16mm films and two camera obscura installations takes viewers on an imaginative journey into science, philosophy and religion.

Each film examines a particular subject - a treatise on material, animal or human behaviour that probes at the nature of truth and perception. Shot with a high-speed camera but projected in slow motion, the films reveal ordinarily imperceptible detail with ghostly effect. Starting from journeys, stories, anecdotes or cinematic allegories and with few contextual cues to enable the enigmatic scenarios to be located in a specific time or place, the veracity of each film is ambiguous.

Whirring mechanics of projectors create a soundscape that draws attention to the absence of sound in the films themselves. Concerned with ‘analogue’ approaches and technologies, any editing is done ‘in camera’ and several films contain multiple exposures within the same frame. The two camera obscura installations directly investigate and display the behaviour of vision and light, and the aperture motif which is reiterated in other works, connects representations of the eye to the camera.

A major new 16mm film work Papagaio (Djambi) 2014, shot in São Tomé and Príncipe (a Portuguese speaking Island nation off the western coast of Central Africa), bears witness to a West African voodoo ritual, known locally as D’Jambi. Whilst intoxicated, the participants dance and enter a state of trance in which they channel the spirits of the dead. At times the footage is shot by the artists, and at other moments the camera becomes an alibi, held and manoeuvred by one of the participants.

With an emphasis on materiality and aesthetic immediacy, Gusmão + Paiva’s work draws attention to the paradoxes in the appearance of reality and probes at the nature of truth, perception and the objectivity of vision.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new artists’ book, assembling meditations on philosophical subjects including Taoism, Buddhism, Decartes and Wittgenstein.

It has been co-curated with Vicente Todoli and organised in association with Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan.

London-based artist Ruth Ewan brings to life the French Republican Calendar in a new work made for Camden Arts Centre’s Gallery 3. In use from 1793 until 1805, the calendar temporarily redefined and rationalised the Gregorian Calendar, stripping it of all religious references in post-revolutionary France. Months and weeks were restructured and seasons and days renamed in collaboration with artists, poets and horticulturalists to reflect the seasonality of nature and agriculture.

Bringing together all 365 items used to denote the days of the year - such as a lettuce, a cart, wax, a turnip, honey, a fir tree, ivy, figs, mercury, lava, moss, tuna, a pheasant, an axe – the gallery will be transformed into a tangible calendar. The title of the exhibition comes from the former title of the French folk song Il Pleut, Il Pleut, Bergère (It Rains, It Rains, Shepherdess) written by the Republican Calendar collaborator, Fabre d'Églantine, who allegedly recited the song’s lyrics calmly at his own execution.

For Ewan, the Republican Calendar is an inspiring and innovative example of collaboration between artists and the state. Often cited as a ‘failed utopianism’, Ewan reconsiders the calendar as a complete artwork in itself, asking what can now be gleaned from this bold reframing of our daily lives. Presenting strands of subversive histories, her work reflects on how radical ideas have been transferred, absorbed or lost within popular culture, whilst reopening their historic continuity to the present moment.

Ewan will present two other projects in sites around Camden Arts Centre, including her ongoing work A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World (started in 2003) in the Café. The CD jukebox invites visitors to choose tracks from its growing catalogue of over 2,200 politically and socially motivated songs. Ewan’s 2011 work We Could Have Been Anything We Wanted to Be, a decimal clock also relating to the Republican Calendar, will be shown outside Gallery 3.

Camden Arts Centre will launch its Instagram account in 2015 to coincide with Ruth Ewan: Back to the Fields. Follow @camdenartscentre #backtothefields to find out more in the forthcoming weeks.

1915 – The Moulin Rouge is destroyed by fire; Cabaret Voltaire is created in Zurich

1965 –Liza Minnelli makes her debut on Broadway

2015 –The Violet Crab at DRAF opens in Camden, London…

The Violet Crab at DRAF looks to cabaret past and present in new commissions, live acts and works from the David Roberts Collection, taking residence in an extravagant mise-en-scene designed and directed by artist Than Hussein Clark. The Violet Crab at DRAF takes cabaret as a situation for queering the inscriptions of time and space.

“The white cube of the gallery must no longer be so terrified of the black box of the theatre. Turning the spatial and temporal architectures of exhibition-making upside down, cabaret provides a narrative framework in which to rearrange hierarchies between subject and object and performance.

I think here of a series of protagonists: Kander & Ebb, two Jewish homosexuals who gleefully pen a new fascist anthem two-thirds of the way through their score for the musical Cabaret; Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden, on whose lucky escape to the musical and sexual underworld of Wiemar the same musical was based; and the French Fumistes without whose radical disdain for order the erotic incoherencies of Wiemar would have never been possible.

So like The Black Cat before it, The Violet Crab at DRAF opens its doors to questions of how the erotic, the melodramatic, and the tragic might satirise the rules of production in the present.” Than Hussein Clark

Than Hussein Clark dramatically reconfigures the structures and architecture of the gallery – from furniture (stages, tables, mirrors, curtains and screens) to concierge to printed matter. The exhibition spaces become cloakroom, bar, stage, backstage and shadow theatre to explore the dynamics of subject and object, attitude and identity. Commissions by other artists include murals by Allison Katz and Shaan Tariq Hassan-Syed, flower arrangement sculptures by Carter Mull, a video by Luiz Roque, with loans from iconic designers Claude and François Xavier Lalanne, a selection of paintings by Anj Smith, works by Cindy Sherman and jewellery by designer Frances Wadsworth-Jones.

Iniva is delighted to present two solo exhibitions of selected work by Swedish artist Lina Selander and Korean artist and film-maker Park Chan-kyong, juxtaposed for the first time, from 14 January to 21 March 2015, at Rivington Place.

The exhibition is curated by Binna Choi and Lisa Rosendahl, initiators along with Grant Watson of Practice International, an EU-Culture-funded research project exploring what internationalism might be, based on practices of trans-national ethics and politics and the legacy of various colonial periods in the context of contemporary art. The exhibition is the second public showing of work presented by Iniva as part of this project.

Iniva’s solo presentations of Park Chan-kyong and Lina Selander bring together synergies within the artists’ practices. Both artists move between documentary forms and the structure of the visual essay as a way to investigate the construction of collective imaginations. In recent works they have explored different manifestations of the utopian aspirations of modernity, political trauma and the role that image-making and the media of film and photography have played in the development of modern society through presentation, depictions, visual control and surveillance.

This first solo presentation of works by South Korean artist Park Chan-kyong presents a series of his latest film and documentary works that offers a new perspective on folk religious practices such as shamanism and utopian religious communities, from the period of colonisation and the cold war to the present time.

By deepening his focus on the division of Korea into South and North - and the ensuing cold war politics as a dominant societal structure - Park’s latest enquiry into the practice of shamanism in the so-called “post-secular” time, reconfigures a way in which art and cultural practice, especially in the non-western context of what he terms the “rootlessness” of its artistic genealogy, engages with political trauma and the repressed.

Park Chan-kyong, Sindoan, film still, 2007

The title of the exhibition Pa-Gyong, which translates as ‘last sutra recitation’, refers to a sacred song sung by the shaman at the end of her ritual, called Gut in Korean. As the shaman recites this sacred song for hours, all spirits, regardless of their relationship with the person that has requested the ritual, are consoled, comforted and sent to heaven. The spirits summoned by the last recitation are those that are deprived of their names and power through violence and trauma. As the shaman does through the last recitation, Park Chan-kyong’s work attends to those nameless or repressed spirits.

A central work in the exhibition is Sindoan (2007), a ‘fantasy-documentary’ that marks a point of transition for Park’s focus on political structure to religious subjects. The title of the work refers to the name of a mountainous area where divergent religious communities established their bases when Korea was occupied by Japan at the turn of the last century. Widely different religions, including shamanism, Confucianism, and Protestantism co-existed in this place for decades under the Gyeryong Mountain. The history of ‘Sindoan’ as presented in the film, tells the history of various forms of oppression, and despite of all these of surviving beliefs, they practice ways of co-existence between human beings and the (super)natural throughout the time of dictatorship and the persisting cold war condition.

The exhibition is contextualised by the presentation of various materials that punctuate Park’s research trajectories, and as a consequence highlight his practice not only as an artist but also as an activist, writer and curator.

Lina Selander: Open System – Silphium and Other
Works curated by Lisa Rosendahl

“I am never sure whether I invent or dream. Rebuilding, excavating the inaccessible chamber from which the desired images will appear, but different.” Extract from Silphium, Lina Selander, 2014.

This exhibition comprises three recent films by Selander together with a selection of materials from the artist’s working archive. Characteristic of Selander’s work is the use of film to build dense layers of images and meaning, through which contemporary society is connected with history and the pre-historic. At the core of her enquiry lies a continuous questioning of the concept and materiality of the image. Selander’s work repeatedly asks us to reconsider the status of the image – as representation, memory, object, imprint or surface – and our relationship to it.

Lina Selander, Silphium, film still 2014.

Silphium (made with Oscar Mangione, 2014) begins by telling the story of the ancient plant Silphium and the connection between the fate of the now extinct plant and the Greek colony Cyrene. The story serves as an entry point into an open-ended visual journey. In the film, methods of power and their symbolic representation are put into question through moments of vulnerability and the loss of visual control.

Model of Continuation (2013) is based on the invisible core of the visible inscription; the image as an interior object and its relationship to seeing and reproduction technologies. A camera is disassembled in a studio in front of another camera whose images are then projected in the same studio, and re-filmed. The film stages a circular encounter between experience and technology, which interferes with that which the camera does not contain: the images.

Anteroom of the Real (2011) takes its starting point in the deserted town of Pripyat, located within the zone of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. A pair of hands flip slowly through a pile of photographs comprising: images of a model of reactor 4, buildings in Pripyat, books in deserted offices, trashed interiors, pictures of a TV monitor showing a documentary about Chernobyl. As the timelines of the still and moving images intersect, the film raises questions about what an editing room is and can be, and about narrativity, time and images.

Lina Selander (b. 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Selander’s work has been shown at Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Kunsthall Trondheim and in international group shows such as Seoul MediaCity Biennale 2014, Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium, the Bucharest Biennale 2010 and at Haus Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Selander will represent Sweden at the 2015 Venice Biennale

Park Chang-kyong (b. 1965) is an artist and a filmmaker based in Seoul. His subjects have extended from the Cold War to traditional Korean religious culture, from ‘media -oriented memory’ to ‘regional utopian imaginations.’ He is currently working as an artistic director of ‘MediaCity Seoul 2014’ (International Media Art Biennale). He has produced media based works such as Sets (2000), Power Passage (2004), Flying (2005), Sindoan (2008), Radiance (2010), Anyang Paradise City (2011), Night Fishing (2011, co-directed with Park Chan-wook) and Manshin (2013).His works have been exhibited in international venues, such as Gwangju Biennale in Korea, De Appel in Amsterdam, RedCat Gallery in Los Angeles, Kunstverein in Frankfurt and many others. He has won various prizes including Hermès Korea Misulsang (2004), Golden Bear Prize for short films of the Berlin International Film Festival (2011) and Best Korean Film of the Jeonju International Film Festival (2011).

Practice International is an initiative of Casco-Office for Art, Design &Theory (Utrecht), Iaspis (Stockholm), and Iniva (London). The project aims to explore what internationalism might be based on practices of trans-national ethics and politics with the legacy of various colonial periods, in the context of contemporary art, introducing new terms and practices into the discourse and into institutional habits.

About Iniva
Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) works at the intersection of society and politics. It engages with new ideas and emerging debates in the contemporary visual arts, reflecting in particular the diversity of contemporary society. We work with artists, curators, creative producers, writers and the public to explore the vitality of visual culture. www.iniva.org Iniva is supported by Arts Council England.

About Rivington Place
Opened in 2007, Rivington Place is home to Iniva and Autograph ABP. Designed by architect David Adjaye OBE, this award winning building is dedicated to the display, debate and reflection of global diversity issues in the contemporary visual arts. Rivington Place is home not just to two exhibition spaces but also Iniva’s Learning Space and unique research library, the Stuart Hall Library. www.rivingtonplace.org

On the occasion of our10th Anniversary, Parasol unit has invited New York based artist James Clar to present a specially commissioned artwork for the outdoor area of the foundation that will remain for the duration of winter. Working in the medium of light as a three-dimensional sculptural form, Clar’s work explores the effects of media and technology within our culture.

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present a solo exhibition of paintings by the London-based painter Katy Moran.

Although Katy Moran’s gestural and highly evocative paintings may appear to be abstract, the artist herself is invariably concerned with the figurative. For her, ideas arise out of the process of painting. She works with the paint, consciously and subconsciously preserving and rejecting marks until she sees they are alive with the energy and power that she considers right. To lose attachment to any figurative referent that may have appeared too soon in the process, she will often turn a canvas and work on it from different perspectives, painting until every part of it works. In this way, she achieves an easy fluidity across the surface that looks as if it were always meant to be just so. Moran remains constantly alert to the unconscious opportunities of chance and time, which she tempers with conscious control, skill and knowledge to make paintings that are intensely and richly powerful.

This ‘Katy Moran’ exhibition presents a survey of her work from the ten years of her practice. The earlier paintings tend to be more loosely gestural with dynamic brushstrokes alive with painted energy and subtly rich colour. Later works, though more structured and detailed, often with added elements of collage, nonetheless abound with the ‘energy’ she demands of all her marks. Even within the modest scale of Moran’s paintings she achieves a remarkable concentration of energy that never fails to thrill viewers. Then there is the pleasure of seeking out the figurative imagery so tantalizingly hinted at in their intriguing titles.

Curated by Ziba Ardalan, Founder/Director of Parasol unit, this exhibition is Katy Moran’s first major solo presentation in a public London institution. It is accompanied by a full colour publication, printed in a limited edition of 500 copies, a limited edition print, along with an educational events programme of related talks, Family and Children workshops, a poetry workshop and Youth projects.

Los Carpinteros

Mar 25 - May 24, 2015 Reception: Tue Mar 24 6pm - 9pm

An exhibition devoted to the work of Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros.